EZtemper

Everyone was doing this yesterday 8-)

I couldn't fit the ribs and brisket into the photo, but they were there!

Forgot it was a holiday in that big country south of us today when I tried to call Tricor!

Never hurts to ask - that's one of the few plants i've not been in i'm afraid. i'd suspect they have one  however

I'm not really in the hotbed of chocolate manufacturing - but a call to tricor might just find me someone not too far away. If I'm not mistaken Cadbury had something in Hamilton years ago - perhaps they are still close by producing.

Hmm.. maybe call the folks at tricor and see if they can direct you to someone in your area that has one?  If not, any of the large mfrs will have them, be it mfr of chocolate (such as cargill, callebaut), or finished product (hershey, mars, etc).  Not sure if you have relationships with any of them...

It would - know anyone with one?  I tried to make my own tempermeter - but it was an abject failure!

It'd be interesting to see if someone would loan you a tricor to get some slope and ctu information on the comparisions...

Here's what those tests from last night looked like this morning. Much clearer that preseeding was badly out of temper.

I'm awaiting delivery of some bean to bar hopefully 'badly out of temper' chocolate to continue my experiments.

Both are based on a similar concept but without taking one apart I wouldn't be able to say if theirs uses the same technology. In terms of capacity there is not much to choose between them.

Ours does use multiple containers - you can continue to use generated seed from one container while you are waiting for the seed to generate in another container - rather than adding cocoa butter straight in to the already generated seed. And you can actually wash the containers after you have emptied them. Theirs has all the cocoa butter in one vessel and I'm not sure if you can take it apart for cleaning.

seems like this is the same technology as the "Magic Temper" Device from CCMS, but smaller and cheaper(?)

Doing some experiments today using chocolate as the seed rather than cocoa butter (for the bean to bar people who don't want to add any additonal cocoa butter). Makes a very stiff paste. Preliminary results seem positive. Bugger to stir in though.

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  Hard to see clearly in these but the left offset in before seeding and it marks with the heat of your finger, the test on the right does not.

Thanks Sebastian.

Thought I'd post a picture of some chocolate I tempered using the EZtemper - on the left I dipped chocolate that had been cooled to 33.5, on the right - the same chocolate from about 1 minute later after pre-crystallizing with 1% generated seed.

Of course tempering chocolate is a bonus - it's real super power is tempering ganaches, allowing you to cut them within hours instead of days. 

Cool stuff Kerry!

I'm pretty thrilled that it finally got off the ground - I've been using my prototypes to temper chocolate, ganaches, meltaways and coloured cocoa butters for almost a year now. Thought it would never be finished!  

Seems only fair that artisan chocolatiers get to take advantage of the same technology that industry uses to pre-crystallize but on a small scale.

Full disclosure - Ruth took one home and I hope she'll post here what she is doing with it. Funny - I've been keeping it a secret so long that I've been hesitant to post about it - but I guess I should get some pictures of what it can do here as well.  

I just returned from a week in D. C. at a chocolate workshop. We had the opportunity of learning from Mark Heim. What vast knowledge he has. One of the new toys we played with is the EZtemper. It is a seed generator for cocoa butter. It maintains CB at a constant 33.7C. It was amazing to see this in action. I have never seen chocolate tempered any faster. You just cool your chocolate to working temp, and stir in .5-1% CB seed and stir a few times. Wait a minute and your chocolate is ready to go. We also made ganache and added it at the end. Ganaches set up in a few hours, even white chocolate ones. We also made gianduja and meltaways. This is new technology to me and I think it will change the way many of us play with chocolate.

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